The Times Online reported that the estimated price of scrap metal for 2009 would be about $418 per ton, which gives family-owned scrapyards a sweet payday when they turn in metal recovered from appliances, cars, and machinery.

We went from my favourite ground, Carisbrook, still standing but no longer a Test arena, amid the scrapyards and panel-beating workshops of Dunedin, to Lancaster Park, as the AMI Stadium was then called, in Christchurch.

Greenpeace said it visited two scrapyards - one at Abogbloshie in the centre of Accra, the main centre for recycling computers in Ghana, and one in the city of Koforidua in the country's Eastern Region.